The present invention relates broadly to coherent optical systems, and in particular to a coherent optical feature identifier apparatus.
Coherent optics is a natural approach to processing two-dimensional pictorial data as millions of bits of information can be processed in parallel, and complex operations, such as special analysis by Fourier transformation, and pattern correlation can be accomplished with a simple configuration of lenses. However, coherent optical processing has not been susceptable in the past in high speed automatic processing of data because of the large numbers of different filters required and the alignment problems associated therewith.